netbook

I spent last week in San Francisco, attending DrupalCon. Like many geeks, I prefer to have a laptop with me at conferences, so I can take notes, check email and work on stuff if I need or want to.

My laptop is a rather lovely HP 6730b with a lot of RAM that does a whopping 1680 x 1050 as native resolution. Great for graphics and having lots of terminals open - less great for portability. HP also seems to have taken the 12 cell add-on battery for it off the market, so it only gives me about 2½ to 3 hours of run-time (with wi-fi enabled) as well.

At DrupalCon I developed netbook envy, so upon arriving home I decided I needed something a lot more portable and with far better battery life.

I did a bit of research and found that all manufacturers offer virtually identically spec'd netbooks that contain an Atom N450, 1GB RAM, 250GB HDD and a 10.1" screen. The only point of difference seems to be the battery size, which ranges from 3 cell to 6 cell Li-ion.

A friend told me he'd just bought an Eeepc 1005P for just over $400, which is actually much cheaper than the competition. Sadly that was with a 10% discount campaign, which is no longer running. Still, the 1005P was at least $30 cheaper than the closest competitor and it does come with a 6 cell battery.